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Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle

jetsonaero.com

181–190 of 246 posts

Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parachutes have a minimum altitude. For standard human chutes, that’s 300 feet (100 meters) or so. Not sure what the ceiling is on this. They don’t have footage of it going too high. You only need to fall 30 feet (10 m), to buy the farm. Less, in many cases (depending on how you fall, and onto what).

Yes. This is why paragliding from hills is more dangerous than regular parachuting from a plane. Your paraglider canopy can collapse due to bad wind or unexpected updrafts at say 40 feet from the ground and you slam into the ground before it recovers. In contrast, when a parachute malfunctions on a freefall deployment, you are often higher than 2000ft, and there is plenty of time to deploy a reserve, fix twisted line…

Beyond the risk level of ground take-off paragliding (and related activities), you have (in my subjective order of least to most risk) wingsuit fliers, base jumpers and then you of course have base jumping wingsuit fliers..

Yet, people still do it..

Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle

#183
It's a nice toy, but the problems of personal aerial vehicles were not about electric motors vs ICE:

- Massive amount of sound pollution, current crop won't be allowed near cities in significant numbers; that's why the presentation videos are always silent.

- Exceptionally energy inefficient and limited speed, due to the way lift is achieved; it makes zero sense to spend 10 times the energy to travel at speeds comparable with what can achieved on the ground with the right infrastructure.

- Very limited safety guarantees, can't be safely used by an untrained pilot, typically can't be flow at all over populated areas etc.

Maybe they could reach for a market that can tolerate these drawbacks, ex. air ambulances, and build on that.

Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have this problem with Lotus cars. They “fit like a glove”.

>They “fit like a glove”. That's the whole point of a Lotus.

Let's just say they are for hands more delicate than mine.

Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle

#185

Very cool, especially the demo video which eventually loaded. Something on their website smells a little whiffy and bovine though: ”[our mission] is to change the way we travel and make the skies available for everyone” Erm. Everyone? I don’t think so. Your mission is to give the 0.1% yet another way to be jerks, only this time with added noise!

> Your mission is to give the 0.1% yet another way to be jerks, only this time with added noise!

Imagine having - instead of car-centric cities - personal-aircraft-centric cities.

Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle

#186

Very cool, especially the demo video which eventually loaded. Something on their website smells a little whiffy and bovine though: ”[our mission] is to change the way we travel and make the skies available for everyone” Erm. Everyone? I don’t think so. Your mission is to give the 0.1% yet another way to be jerks, only this time with added noise!

Lots of things start off as only for rich people, and get cheaper as the technology matures and scales up. Making something only rich people can afford can be part of the process of making something available for everyone.

(In this case it costs $92k, so under 0.1% in rich countries)

Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle

#187
Before I left California I actually looked into personal transport, only half ironically. The real estate costs are so nuts it would be cheaper to get a house inland across the mountains (Southern California) and buy a personal aircraft to commute.

Telecommuting is better.

Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle

#188

Very cool, especially the demo video which eventually loaded. Something on their website smells a little whiffy and bovine though: ”[our mission] is to change the way we travel and make the skies available for everyone” Erm. Everyone? I don’t think so. Your mission is to give the 0.1% yet another way to be jerks, only this time with added noise!

Like cell phones!

Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle

#189

Very cool, especially the demo video which eventually loaded. Something on their website smells a little whiffy and bovine though: ”[our mission] is to change the way we travel and make the skies available for everyone” Erm. Everyone? I don’t think so. Your mission is to give the 0.1% yet another way to be jerks, only this time with added noise!

Knee-jerk ascription of new product classes to elitism isn't constructive.

The iPhone, when first released in 2007, cost $500, or about $800 today after adjusting for inflation, but launched a smartphone industry that today produces devices that are affordable enough that 3 billion own one, including some that go for as little as $50 and have better performance than the original iPhone.

Re: Jetson One – Personal Electric Aerial Vehicle

#190
post #4

I swear I saw something like this in some kids magazine 30 years ago. It was supposedly powered by a vacuum motor. I now understand that can’t possibly work, but for many years I thought it could. I’d love it if someone else knew what I’m talking about and could send me a link to the magazine article. I assume it wasn’t trying to be a joke, this was a relatively serious kids magazine, but maybe I’ve been wrong.

It was a regular advertisement in the 1980s and 1990s in Boys' Life magazine, published by the Boy Scouts of America. Picture of the ad: https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/7jrpbu/this_hove...

This has literally solved one of the mysteries of my childhood. Now I understand, it wasn’t lying, I just misunderstood.
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